Analysis Of The Hounds Of Tindalos Essays - Hounds Of Tindalos

Analysis Of The Hounds Of Tindalos Essays - Hounds Of Tindalos Analysis Of The Hounds Of Tindalos Textual Analysis The Hounds of Tindalos The Hounds of Tindalos is a short science fiction story containing many and varied elements that have been long associated with the genre of science fiction. This essay will identify these elements, examining their placement within this short text and also the interchange of these elements with the characteristics of other genres, more specifically, horror. Belknap Long, the author, was clearly intent of incorporating the elements of horror within the genre of science fiction and this amalgamation of these two genres was a popular combination employed by future horror and SF writers. Perhaps the inclusion of horror within the SF genre is a comment in itself about perceptions of SF held by writers, the elements of horror being a cautionary warning to those in the science world. Longs main character is Halpin Chalmers, a self proclaimed rebel and champion of originality and lost causes. From the start it is clear there are present within this text some elements of the SF genre that seem to be in just about every SF story, beginning with the main character. Many writers have as their main characters people who are non-conformists, who wish to boldly go where no one has gone before and who are willing to take seemingly illogical and irrational risks in the hope of furthering makinds scientific discoveries. Chalmers is no exception in this as he willingly partakes in an ancient Chinese drug that is a known powerful hallucinogen in a bid to go back in time. There is of course the proverbial wet blanket in the shape of the narrator, known only as Frank, who believes his friend Chalmers to be quite mad, but who never-the-less agrees to aid his friend in his bizarre experiment despite the risks he is taking. Frank represents all those characters in SF stories who a re the skeptics, the non believers, who have a solid faith in the science of the present, and who consider characters like Chalmers to be eccentric and bizarre. The setting of The Hounds of Tindalos is in the late 1920s and the location is Central Square. Chalmers apartment room is where most of the story takes place. The room is in keeping with Chalmers character as a rejector of modern science and one who is still entranced with the historical side of science and history preferring illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding machines. The room eventually becomes a doorway for Chalmers, a place where he can go back in time and also a place where he can be hunted through time. The transformation of the room through the application of plaster of Paris was an intersting one I felt as it appeared to directly contradict many other SF strories where the door to parallel universes, dimensions and time is often spherical in shape. Chalmers believes that making his room devoid of any sharp angles and strange curves that he will escape the Hounds, that in making his room spherical in shape he will avoid det ection and the scenting of the Hounds. In the end this obviously does not work as Chalmers ends up dead, however the question to ask would be whether or not the Hounds found him simply because the plaster fell off the walls and they were able to come through the angles between the walls, floor and ceiling, or was it because the room was now spherical thanks to the the plaster. I would answer with the former given his statement to Frank about the foul and the pure. The foul expresses itself through angles; the pure through curves. The language Long uses in his story is very descriptive, enabling the reader to visualise quite vividly the scenes that take place in the room. Through the narrators eyes we see clearly the changes that occur in the main character Chalmers as the drug takes effect and transports him through time in the various different periods of history. It is a very rapid journey yet the author has managed with minimal amounts of words to convey exactly where Chalmers went and what he witnessed from the acting of a Shakespearian play in an Elizabethan theatre to him